Let's face it, education is doing a fast and furious downward spiral. I have to admit that Obama is failing me in this arena, though I'd like to get his ear and let him know all of the consequences of the policies he's putting through. Here's the simplified version of Bush's and Obama's policies and the effects they have on the kids:
No Child Left Behind turned into a few things... No Child Left Untested... All Children Are Exactly The Same And Should Have Exactly The Same Education. Any way you looked at it, this policy left millions of children behind. Schools slid into "SURR" (school under registration review) status faster than they could be helped. Thousands of children were flung into the mainstream classes, both from classes tailored to children with special needs and from AP and excellerated classes.
Under the new administration, teachers are the enemy. Teachers are incompetant. If a school is failing, they'll give the district millions of dollars to fire everyone and start over! Starting over means they are allowed to rehire half the staff! There are four models under this administration that a district can follow when a school is designatted PLA (persistantly low achieving... as opposed to SURR under the previous administration): 1) Closure - exactly what it sounds like. Everyone in the building goes somewhere else. All students are supposed to be redistributed to schools that are NOT designated PLA schools. 2) Restart - close the school and reopen it under a charter or educational management organization. 3) Transformation - get rid of the principal and provide the staff with the training necessary to succeed... oh yeah, and "reward" teachers who students perform well. 4) Turnaround - fire the principal and staff (50% of which can be rehired), "reward" "good" teachers, provide professional development to promote success.
Notice how neither of these administrations really look at FIXING poor performing schools. Being an educator, I see the all the wonderful and horrible things that happen. For example, districts who take the top performing 30% of students and places them in a few "special" schools and then takes all of the students with special needs and packs them into other "special" schools... I thought that was called segregation? If that's too strong of a word, I'm sorry. But think about how a school is going to succeed when they more than 50% of their students have special needs?
Today, all children in New York State are espected to get a Regent's diploma. In order to get this diploma, students have to pass five Regent's exams. Students with identified with special needs have special exams, but they can only take them once they have failed the Regent's. To combat this, the grading of the Regent's exams has gotten easier and easier. On the English Regent's exam, students only have to get 60% of the multiple choice questions correct and get a 6 out of 10 on the writing. The History Regents' are graded much like the English, but if they get a 6 out of 10 on the essays, they only need 32 out of 62 multiple choice! Better yet, to pass the Biology Regent's, a student only has to get 35 out of 85 points...that's 41%! The Algebra Regent's is slightly more dismal... 30 out of 87 points, which is only 34%!
What are the solutions? I'm not going to repeat what has already been written by Arthur Scott (http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial-page/viewpoints/article371710.ece) in the Buffalo News on Sunday. Read his beautiful article and think about over the next few weeks the impact that poor schools will have on the future of this country.
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